Year: 2018

Cable vs Mobile

If you live in the middle of nowhere (as I do) then you may well be utterly reliant on mobile broadband. We have tried to get “normal” broad band at our house, but just can’t the wire is long (1.5km) and goes through trees (which rub through the wire) and there are also squirrels and other nibblers that chew through wires, seamingly for the fun of it.

So Mobile Braodband it is. This is where you get a dongle or router, put in a SIM card and get your internet that way. There are a few pros and cons to doing this:

Mobile Broadband Speed

Much much better than BT copper broadband. Around 10 times as fast. Of course this depends slightly on which carrier you are using. I have tried Giffgaff, Vodafone and Three (3). They have all been good.

Vodafone 4G Speeds

4G at present is the best offering with vodafone this gives 17.30mbs and a quick ping time* of 33ms. This is very good, and allows for just about any type of web use you could wish for.

Vodafone 3G Broadband Speeds

As an experiment if you were to turn off the 4G funtionality of your router / dongle you will find that the band width drops far below a 3G maxium of approx 7mbs. The ping time alos increases.

Three (3) 3G Broadband Speeds

But as you can see from the above this does not hold true if the operator / carrier is switched. 3 delivers a higher speed at 3G in my area than vodafone.

*Mobile Broad Band Ping Time

Ping times over 100ms can srat to become notcable apparently. For gaming (worst case scaenario) real;ly you need 50ms or less. But for webbrowsing etc, you really cant tell at 100ms or just over.

Also ping time changes depending on where the server you are accessing is situated, so it changes from place to place.

Mobile Broad Band Data Usage

It is thought that a typical household on an unlimited data use contract whether it be through the phoneline, fibre or mobile carrier will use 190GB per month of data.

Most mobile broadband contracts include around 20GB of data. I have tried using 50GB a month and that is OK, provided you do not watch any TVover the ineternet. If you are using netflix, or iplayer then you will need 100GB a month minimum. You shoudl be careful to note that most carrier give a “teathering” amount of say 30GB, so even if yoou have 100GB of data on your plan, you can only use 30GB of it in a dongle or for mobile broadband.

Having had a look for comedic maps of Devon on the Internet I find them somewhat lacking. So I have just knocked up this one, I am am failry happy with the picture but it is not a great shape for a logo. Something that fits within a square is better.

Devon Rules!

Most google of face book logo fit within a sqaure area typoically recommended at 600 x600 pixels for example. So an oblong logo is sub optimal- back to the drawing board.

An Illustration of Mars Exploration: I recently answered a question on a Quora regarding a one way ticket to mars. . . . as a Mars Human Guinea Pig. It was an interesting question. I wanted to make the answer a good one and get a back link for this site. I drew the below mars based illustration, to embelish my answer.

What would it be like to take a one way trip to mars?

In the film the “The Martin” we see the main guy running around working hard on survival and coming home. But what if you weren’t coming home?